On the subject of ISCSI and udev

Ok so I admit I haven't been updating the web site recently. Im pretty much overrun with work (and I took a weeks holiday) so updates to swingbench have had to be put on hold. That said I haven't been idle. I've been setting up a RAC cluster under Oracle Virtual Server (NOTE : This is not currently supported).

The environrment is build using 3 Dell Lattitude notebooks and a 1Gb Netgear switch. I've installed one notebook with OpenFiler as the storage server and two additional notebooks with Oracle Virtual Server. (NOTE : this really isn't advised as a production implementation Winking). I've used the Oracle Enterprise Template to create the Linux Servers running Oracle11g. It was pretty straight sailing with a few notable exceptions
  • Many of the shipping templates benefit (and some require) the activation of hardware acceleration. This can be done via the BIOS and will make a big difference to performance in most circumstances.
  • UDev and ISCSI. This sadly caused me real problems and Im still not sure why. I was under the impression that the devices presented from the Openfiler (the ISCSI Target) would have consistent ID's. Now I've no reason to make this claim it just seemed like a sensible thing to do. I originally used the ENV{ID} to uniquely identify the devices and create persistent links to the disks. However subsequent reboots showed these to change. We eventually ended up using a rule similar to the folowing
ENV{ID_PATH}=="ip-10.167.176.217:3260-iscsi-iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:iscsistorage.quorumdisk", OWNER="oracle", GROUP="dba", MODE="0640", SYMLINK+="disk/by-name/quorumdisk"
  • We also encountered some library issues (rpm), Some of the openfiler devices couldn't be seen however upgrading to the very latest initiator libraries solved the problem (At the time of writing this iscsi-initiator-utils-6.2.0.868-0.7.el5).
Other than that the Oracle install went very smoothly and the cluster appears stable and performs well given the hardware its running on.

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